Computer systems are well known in the art. One example of such a system is described in U.S. Published Application No. 2004/0003158 (Doblar), which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety. Other examples also exist.
In general, an orthogonal system architecture typically employs two identical stacks of board elements, a first stack 130 orientated in the vertical plane, and a second stack 140 orientated in the horizontal plane. Such a configuration is shown, for example, in FIG. 1. The two stacks 130, 140 of the orthogonal system architecture shown in FIG. 1 are preferably interconnected directly using connector technology, rather than employing cable harnesses and the like. In such a configuration, the orthogonal structure provides a connector based interface from each board element in the vertical first stack 130 to each board element in the horizontal second stack 140.
While the unique interconnect approaches of orthogonal system architectures has yielded improvements in communication fabric construction over non-orthogonal system architectures, it has also imposed cumbersome control plane architectures in some applications. As used herein, the term “control plane architecture” refers to those components that provide management functions for stacks 130, 140 of board elements. Examples of management functions include control of electrical power to individual board elements, monitoring of environmental sensors (humidity, temperature, etc), surrogate board element initialization and control functions, and/or any other capabilities that support one or more of the mission goals of the particular orthogonal system being implemented.
Existing approaches for providing control plane architectures “wrap” the control plane around the orthogonal structure of processing planes, which has required deployment of networks of control elements and/or external control servers to support the wrapped control plane architecture. As such, these approaches have led to cabling challenges and have required elaborate communications architectures to provide the control capability described above. Further, these approaches can suffer from communication delays and synchronization errors, and from dropped or corrupted packets traversing the associated networking.
A need thus exists for an improved orthogonal system architecture that eliminates or reduces one or more problems with existing control plane architectures. Other advantages and features may also be achieved using one or more embodiments of the present invention as would be readily understood by those of skill in the art after reading this disclosure.